Frank takes a look at the recently released Supreme Commander demo.

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I had a chance to sit down yesterday and really sink my teeth into the recently released demo of Supreme Commander. Much like Total Annihaliation, the developer's previous title, this game arrives in the wake of many other great RTS games. With Company of Heroes stealing the limelight last year and Command and Conquer 3 on the horizon, Supreme Commander was going to have to do quite a bit to convince me that it had a place in the current RTS scene.

Not confident in my own computer, I decided to take a trip to a friend's house to play the demo on his brand-new rig: a Core 2 Duo E660 with an 8800 GTS and 2GB of RAM: a more than adequate box for playing this title, I thought.

From the outset, the demo gives you a fairly good idea of what to expect from the lore and backstory that enriches the game. A war spanning a thousand years is currently underway—titled the "infinite war," no less. The Earth has become a torn battlefield and only a small band of forces called the United Earth Federation is standing strong against all adversity. As the UEF, the Cybran, or the Aeon, you must fight this war and attempt to end it.

With the story in place, I proceeded to play through the packaged portion of the Cybran campaign. The first thing I played around with was the much-touted global scaling. The game allows you to zoom very, very far out from the playing field, enabling you to micromanage many different wars at once. This essentially increases the scale of the battlefield as a whole, and would make seeing the entirety of the playing field on bigger, more complex levels quite easy. At first, this seemed very handy: I was building units on one side of the map and assaulting enemies on the other, all without using the mini-map. However, as the level got more complicated and the wars involved a larger number of units, I found myself prone to playing completely zoomed out, which relegates on-screen units into those little Commodore 64 triangles. Ultimately, playing zoomed out, which makes the battlefield far more manageable, seems to counteract the need for the sophisticated graphics that the game boasts: big battles degrade into triangles versus triangles.

But that wasn't all that bothered me. The default UI is a catastrophe. In an age of gaming where minimalist UIs and clean screens reign, the archaic and blocky blue digital read-outs that populate the bottom and top of the screen look atrocious. Though functional in terms of operation, they seriously limit the viewing pane of the battlefield: about 25-40% of the screen is lost to the bottom pane alone. Upping the resolution helped slightly, but the ratio of playing field to UI was still unpleasant—and with no options to adjust the fading or opacity, so it stayed.

The graphics certainly are impressive, though. Many of the models are incredibly detailed for an RTS, and zooming right in reveals a fairly expansive set of animations for each of the finely-crafted units. However, this polish makes certain other things stand out all the more; certain areas seem slightly rough around the edges. For example, the fog of war disappears and reappears as though it were from Warcraft 2. This may seem like nit-picking, but when you're zoomed out it's incredibly jarring to see the fog just pop into place without any sort of smoothing.

The true bread and butter of games like this come in the form of the nuances that only reveal themselves after hours of play. Thus, my short time with the demo was nowhere near long enough to fully grasp the entirety of what Supreme Commander offers, but nevertheless I feel as though the scaling is the only noteworthy element of a game that falls squarely within the confines of an exhaustive genre. Maybe my RTS days are dwindling, but without the difference of an atmosphere like Company of Heroes or some other noteworthy differentiating factor, Supreme Commander feels like just another space-based war sim to me. The zooming out is nice, but it makes me look forward to Spore more than anything else.